Before You Begin Searching

Think about how you would describe your topic (or perhaps what terms you are going to use in your research question). Then search for those terms along with words like "China," "urban," and "history."

The catalog and most databases have an "Advanced Search" option which allows you to put in multiple terms at the beginning of your search, and to use other helpful tools to get a better results list.

Note on Chinese Names

The spellings of Chinese city names can vary because there are different ways of rendering names originally in Chinese characters into English. This process is called Romanization. An example is the name of China's capital city, which used to be rendered "Peking" but is now rendered "Beijing."

Databases will often have a preferred Romanization, which can be found in the database's thesaurus. Often, the preferred Romanization will give you all the articles in the database, but if you see other Romanizations in your results list, try searching for them as well.